Hello member friends, Welcome to this series of tutorials on Network Simulation. Am too a newbie interested in learning the network simulation and from past 6 months in the process of learning the different tools related to network simulation. In this process I did the survey on tools like NS2, Omnetpp, NS3 etc

This tutorial is the basic Introduction of simulation, where we shall see what is the simulation, how its carried out, its advantages and dis advantages...

Usually to test and understand the models, low cost methods are required based on its result real system will be evaluated or manufactured. Its like flight simulator, without letting the trainee pilot to directly use the real aircraft which he can damage very much, he is allowed to test himself on the flight simulator before going on the real Aircraft to reduce training cost and damage.

We can do it in two ways
1. Analytic model - Its a mathematical model with which the entire scenario is described and less number of assumption are made, usually mathematical models give accurate results
2. Simulation model - Simulation tries to re-create the real scenario with components which are acting very much similar to the real model. Here almost all the real world components are recreated, while doing so lot of assumptions will be done...Hence the Simulation model is not much accurate. Less number of assumption you make better will be the result..

Here in these tutorial we are talking only about the Network Simulation. So basically we want to simulate how the network and network protocols work in the real and analyse its behavior.

Steps carried out in performing the Simulation:-

1. Planning:- Its about designing the model and planning the simulation its take 40% of time
2. Implementation:- It consumes 20% of the time
a. Initialization: making the initial settings like setting the clock and creating the variables
b. Result Generation: create and generates result and perform all operations like real system do
c. Post processing: The data collected from the Result generation is in the raw format, that data will be processed and results are generated from it
3. Testing: We need to test whether the simulation result we got is matching to the real world or not and validate it. It takes 40% of the time.

Most of the simulation tools follow this same pattern. In this series of tutorial I am going to use NS2 as my tool for simulation which is going to follow exactly the same pattern. First we will plan the simulation, implement it, execute it and run the simulation, which will generate the raw result and this raw result will be analyzed and final result will be generated

So this will end of Intro to Simulation, very soon we will see the network examples and NS2 related information